by Fred Rosen
Even in death, Margaret Ann dressed properly, in ribbed nylon pantyhose, slip, and panties underneath her habit. Removing the clothes, the ME discovered her body covered by the same thick white mold that covered her face. The stuff extended over the clothing as well as the stockings. Overall, the body “appears quite dehydrated and mummified.”
The ME scraped most of the mold away “from the region of the left neck and thorax. The stab wounds are readily apparent, they are now dry and shriveled. The jaw is exposed and molars from the left side of the jaw are removed for submission to BCI for DNA purposes. Pubic hair standards and head hair standards are also removed and these items are given to Ms. Stacy Shipman, representative of the Bureau of Criminal Identification.”
Next, Scala-Barnett reopened the Y-shaped classical incision that went from the thorax to the pubic bone. Examining the nun’s insides, she found nothing different from Dr. Fazekas’s 1980 autopsy. But that was 1980 and this was 2004. Scala-Barnett and forensic anthropologist Julie Saul did some interesting things to Margaret Ann’s body over the following week.
Working together, the two medical professionals “tediously removed soft tissue from bone in the areas of the left jaw and preauticular [ear] area, cervical vertebrae, manubrium, sternum and anterior runs. A total of six boney defects were revealed.”
Depending on your point of view, prosecution or defense, what happen next was either a brilliant piece of new police technology or old-fashioned voodoo hoodoo. The two scientists took the priest’s letter opener and “we examined and compared the similarities of the suspected weapon to the boney defects. The suspected weapon was introduced into three of the boney defects as well as the cartilaginous interface. The suspected weapon was an exact fit [author emphasis] from all angles.”
Scala-Barnett concluded:
“It is my opinion, from my examination of the first autopsy photographs, the stab wounds in the skin, and by my examination of the boney defects at the end of the stab wounds path recovered at the second autopsy, that the weapon in question, the dagger letter opener with the Washington, DC insignia, is an instrument identical to the shape and size of this, and has caused these wounds.”
Dated June 10, 2004, Scala-Barnett signed the three-page single-spaced report. Copies were delivered to the cops and prosecutors working the case. A copy was also delivered to defense attorney John Thebes. Shortly after Robinson’s arrest, John Thebes took his case. Thebes knew Father Robinson from his second grade class at Christ the King where Robinson served as the second pastor out of three from 1969 to 1972. Approached by Robinson’s family to represent him, he agreed. A Roman Catholic, Thebes did not think his client a murderer.
Pending trial, Robinson was arraigned. The judge set him free on a $200,000 bond. Robinson had no money, but his supporters did. After his arrest, they came forth in the hundreds, putting up their homes for collateral. They crowded around him when he was released on bail on May 3, slapping him on the back like he was a rock star. These were people who had been parishioners in Robinson’s churches over the years and found him to be a decent, kind fellow.
Soon, three more lawyers came aboard to help the father fight the first-degree murder charge. There were John Callahan, silver-haired, elegantly dressed, the dean of Toledo attorneys; Michelle Khoury, a twenty-eight-year-old criminal defense attorney with two acquittals to her credit; and Alan Konop, a veteran defense attorney with a coiffed white beard and piercing dark eyes highlighted by an ever-present set of glasses worn at the end of his nose.
All of Gerald Robinson’s attorneys worked pro bono. Robinson’s supporters had fund-raisers to help pay for the other expenses his defense would engender, including fees for expert witnesses. The weight of the state might be bearing down on Father Robinson’s frail shoulders, but as far as his former parishioners were concerned, the father had God on his side and he would eventually be proven innocent.
For its part, the state was moving forward. Forrester had done some research and discovered that a Catholic diocese is required under canon law to maintain secret archives of any criminal investigation. Confronted with this information, Father Billian at the diocese denied the existence of such an archive in Toledo. This time, the cops didn’t trust him. Forrester and Ross put together a no-knock search warrant allowing them to search the diocese’s headquarters for those secrets, signed by Judge Robert Christiansen of Lucas County Common Pleas Court. They served it at diocesan headquarters, Catholic Center, on September 15, 2004.
Father Billian happened to be out at the time. Another priest, confronted with the no-knock warrant, took the cops to a file room. He left them alone for a few minutes and then came back with a thick manila folder. Inside were scores of documents about Robinson’s service to the diocese.
The cops came back with a second no-knock warrant two days later on September 17, allowing them to search Billian’s office for his records on Robinson. This time, they came away with nothing. Wherever the secret archives were, they appeared destined to remain that way. Bishop Blair made a public statement that despite “the claim that the church’s Code of Canon Law says that dioceses should maintain a secret archive,” Toledo not only didn’t have one, as far as Blair knew, one had probably never existed in the past either.
Blair failed to explain why, if the diocese was so cooperative with the police, the cops needed not one, not two, but three search warrants, two within days of each other, to search Catholic Center. Then again, it wasn’t Blair who was going on trial.
What with pretrial motions and postponements of one sort or another, the wheels of justice in Toledo move ever so slowly.
September 8, 2005
The fire burned white hot, melting the sides of two fire trucks dispatched to contain it. With the wind at its back, the flames turned, burning six homes to the ground in a matter of minutes. While any fire can burn hot and cold in spots, one that gets to white hot destroys all evidence. Nothing survives.
That’s a good thing if you’re an arsonist.
It started in the rear apartment of 2425 Broadway, beside the Maumee River about half a mile from the Toledo Zoo. The apartment was rented to SNAP’s Toledo leader, Claudia Vercellotti. Before the fire, Vercellotti was lying on the bed in her bedroom. On the other end of the phone line was her mother. Claudia was trying to justify begging off a not-very-important doctor’s appointment.
Her mother urged her to go. After hanging up, Claudia lay there in the early evening twilight. She could hear the boats on the river. It was soothing and restful. That damn appointment, she thought, feeling the guilt pangs of a child who knows her parent is right.
“So I stood up, scooped my wallet and keys up that were on the piano.” Also on the piano was the urn containing her father’s ashes. “I just went to the door and I walked out. There was nothing that told me this was forever. There was nothing unusual, nothing out of place.”
Claudia left to make her doctor’s appointment. This time, the guilt saved her life. Forty-three minutes later, at about 4:43 P.M., firemen later estimated, Vercellotti’s apartment was on fire, and with it, eighteen file drawers of collected research and insider documents, many of which had never been made public. Most of the documents pertained to cases of priests sexually abusing minors.
The day after the fire, Vercellotti sorted through the ashes. “Everything was gone. Everything…” But she searched within the ashes for her father’s remains in the urn that had sat atop the piano. She never found it.
“I am only left with questions and no answers. I was there tonight, I deeply miss the water. There are large slabs of concrete there, from the dig on the first property that is being rebuilt. It’s surreal, really. My heart still races when I drive up the street. I am undergoing a lot of delayed grieving.
“I can’t tell you it was arson and they can’t tell me it wasn’t—and I can’t afford to believe one over the other. It’s hard to think though, that anyone deemed me a threat. The diocese really looked at me as a nuisance, a
mild nuisance—like the fly at the picnic that won’t go away.”
December 24, 2005
Vercellotti vastly underestimated her importance. Without her lobbying for Sister Damon with the state, there would have been no prosecution of Gerald Robinson for murder. It had been Detective Ross who noticed Robinson’s name in Damon’s statement, but it was Vercellotti who got the statement into the right hands. While the TPD had yet to get back to Damon regarding an investigation into the rape allegations against Robinson, it was easy to see that a murder indictment trumped a rape indictment any day of the week.
Assistant prosecutor Dean Mandros won a lot more than he lost. Just like every other attorney on this case, and on most cases in Lucas County, Mandros had graduated from the University of Toledo School of Law. The place was so popular locally, it ought to do a public offering.
They taught Mandros well. Amending a charge of first-degree murder or, as it’s known in Ohio, “aggravated murder,” to the lower charge of “murder” meant that Mandros did not have to prove premeditation. The penalty for “aggravated murder” was twenty to life. The penalty for “murder” was fifteen to life. In Ohio, there was no time off for good behavior. The minimum was the minimum.
Trading five years behind bars for a sixty-eight-year-old in poor physical condition for a better shot at convicting him seemed like a good deal. Yet, despite its confident public stance on getting a conviction against a priest, the Lucas County Prosecutor’s Office knew it would not be easy.
It never is, when it hasn’t been done before.
CHAPTER 12
…and Trial
April 21, 2006
After almost two years of behind-the-scenes legal wrangling over everything from purported audio statements Robinson had made in 1980 to the accuracy of blood transfer analysis evidence, the trial of Father Gerald Robinson for the 1980 murder of Sister Margaret Ann Pahl was finally ready to begin. It had only taken twenty-six years.
The decedent was back in her grave, hopefully never to be bothered again. Margaret Ann’s body had been redressed in a fresh habit and her eyeglasses repositioned over her now mold-free face. Her rosary with the two crosses was carefully placed back in her mummified hands. The morgue attendants then placed the body of the woman who was born in 1909 and died in 1980, in an ambulance that transported her to the Keller-Ochs-Koch Funeral Home. From there, Margaret Ann Pahl was taken back to her grave, hopefully for the final time.
Judge Thomas Osowik’s second-floor wood-paneled courtroom was filled to overflowing. A fourteen-person jury had gone through voir dire and been seated. To their left were two large tables. The one nearer was the prosecution’s. Mandros, the chief of the criminal division, took first chair. He was assisted by Larry Kiroff, who had ten years’ experience as a civil litigator for the feds and the city; and forensics expert J. Christopher Anderson.
Farther away from the jury was the defense table. Dressed in his clerical habit, despite an order from the diocese that he wear “civvies,” was the frail, white-haired figure of Gerald Robinson, surrounded by his “Fantastic Four.” The courtroom of Judge Osowik was filled to overflowing. No surprise considering what was happening outside.
Usually vacant hotel rooms were filled to capacity. The restaurants, even the lousy ones, had lots of business. The big carnival had descended once more on Toledo. The longer the trial of the priest went on, the bigger the ratings, the more ads the cable channels would sell, and the more Toledo’s businesses prospered. Lord knew they needed something.
In 1980, the Pahl murder case had more of the lurid aspects of a National Enquirer story than something carried on the national pages of local newspapers. By 2006 the noses came down and the story went mainstream. The tabloids got a run for their money from everybody—the broadcast networks, the cable networks, newspapers, radio, and most of all, online Web sites where anyone could voice an opinion on the case.
At home, just a few miles away, Dave Davison, like most of Toledo’s residents, was glued to his TV set. Court TV had gotten the pool contract and was in the courtroom providing a live video feed. They carried the trial live and provided highlights to everyone else. All that coverage sucked the humanity right out of the case.
Because television is a visual and not a verbal medium like radio, the heartbreaking image constantly repeated throughout the world at the beginning of the trial was that of poor Father Robinson at the defense table, old, frail, with his wispy hair and stoic countenance. He certainly was a scene stealer. This image of him was constant as the trial played out before the camera.
The staged formality of a trial plays exceptionally well on TV, especially when there’s juicy testimony interrupting the more boring stuff. During the “dueling banjos” opening statements, Mandros’s forensic zenith was pointing to Dr. Diane Scala-Barnett’s conclusion that the tip of the priest’s letter opener fit parts of the nun’s jaw exactly. That, of course, implied rather strongly that Robinson had done it. The jury would then have no choice but to convict. Still, the biggest problem in front of the jury was the motive for the killing.
Why did the priest kill the nun? Mandros acknowledged this question during his opening, while making it clear that, under the law, the prosecution did not have to prove motive to prove murder. That is commonly accepted criminal law in all fifty states, and rightly so. How many times have you read about a senseless murder in your local paper and tried to figure out why? There is no why? Sometimes people kill because they enjoy it. Sometimes they do it because they get too drunk, lose control of their vehicle and kill somebody.
Is getting drunk a motive for murder? Certainly not. In fact some states allow you to use inebriation as a “diminished capacity” defense. However, it is good to give a jury motive because that is what they expect. They watch Law & Order; Law & Order: Criminal Intent; Law and Order: SVU; CSI; CSI: New York; CSI: Miami; and of course, CSI: Dubuque just like everyone else. In Robinson’s case, Mandros alluded to problems between the priest and the nun as a “motive.”
What the prosecution did not say was that they had violated the sanctity of Margaret Ann Pahl’s grave in the wild-goose chase pursuit of a conviction using twenty-first-century DNA technology. Yes, they had their letter opener-into-mandible evidence, forensic supposition, not science. What they had really been going after was DNA. Find Robinson’s DNA on her, and the jury had no choice but to convict.
But there was never any chance of getting Robinson’s or anyone else’s DNA off Margaret Ann Pahl’s body. Dr. Fazekas’s 1980 autopsy report stated clearly that the killer had left no hair, fibers, or blood behind. Any way the pathologist cut it, this was a circumstantial case. But somehow, the misinformation got around the Net that there was DNA to be discovered.
Alan Konop did the opening for the defense and went for the obvious—the purely circumstantial evidence in the case. The prosecution had not one piece of direct evidence tying Gerald Robinson to the crime, let alone the crime scene. He also questioned the quality of the prosecution’s so-called forensic evidence. Those all added up to “reasonable doubt.” The jury would then have no choice but to find Gerald Robinson “not guilty” of murder.
After a lunch break the jurors were transported to the scene of the crime, the chapel at Mercy Hospital that still exists as it was in 1980. The fourteen jurors were given a guided tour of the chapel while a bailiff read from a carefully edited document that prosecution and defense had gone over before trial. It basically identified key places in the chapel that would be referred to during subsequent sworn testimony.
In subsequent days, the prosecution carefully built a timeline of the 1980 murder using testimony from Sister Phyllis Ann, the Sisters of Mercy hospital administrator in 1980, now retired. Detective Marx, also retired, testified to how the investigation was conducted in 1980 and what the results were. Marx said on the stand that his interrogation of Robinson had been interrupted by Deputy Chief Ray Vetter, Monsignor Schmit, and an attorney (Hank Herschel). He had left the roo
m at Vetter’s orders. The investigation effectively ended there.
Terry Cousino testified quite dramatically in the well of the courtroom. With the judge allowing him off the stand and the jury out of the box, they crowded around him and he showed them one of the prosecution’s crucial pieces of evidence—the much-tested 1980 punctured altar cloth. Cousino then showed the jury how the punctures in the altar cloth formed a cross. They also matched up to the priest’s letter opener.
Holding the letter opener in her hand, Dr. Diane Scala-Barnett took the stand and illustrated for the jury “the lock and key mandible theory,” with the tip of the letter opener being the key and the mandible the lock. It was dramatic testimony, though scientifically it was open to conjecture, since it depended upon Dr. Scala-Barnett’s interpretation of evidence, not proven scientific fact. Still, it was compellingly dramatic.
At the heart of the prosecution’s case was blood pattern transfer analysis. If they could convince the jury that the pattern of Robinson’s letter opener was left on the altar cloth punctured over her chest, it would be another nail in the priest’s coffin. Mandros had lined up not one but two of the world’s five experts to testify for the prosecution.
Ms. T. Paulette Sutton holds a master of science degree from the University of Arkansas. She began studying bloodstain pattern analysis with Professor Herbert MacDonnell in 1983. Twelve years later, MacDonnell testified for the defense in the Nicole Brown Simpson/ Ronald Goldman murder case. This occurred after the defendant, O. J. Simpson, tried on a pair of gloves he allegedly wore during the murders. The gloves were too small to fit his hands, or so it seemed on camera.
